[x]

the weeds across the street.She’s the little girl with flaxen curls at four pm flouncing down her driveway with her hands buried in her pockets, lips pressed out like she’s whistling. You’ll watch her out your window, with your tea lukewarm on the sill, and splutter a cough; fogging up the glass just enough to miss her smile.

You saw her once, twice eating petals off the roses in your garden. You’ve forgotten how to converse with children, you cussed between the wheezing and she stared right past like you were simply a knurled twig catching the wind in its leaves.

One morning you found her; purple stockings, blush mittens and a head of sunlight cur

leavemedon'tleaveme.you make me sick. you make my stomach fold in on itself and press out against the lining of my flesh. you put lumps in my throat and you tie strings to my tear glands and tug until the world is just a panoply of blurred lines, hazy colour and bokeh.

you made me do this. you put the knife in my fingers and you told me to tear, you said you would care if i hurt myself like this. you said you’d care if i opened my flesh up for you like a gift of blood and flesh and tissue. but you never really did.

i like being small, i like being the blue eyed girl sitting amidst background noise, rubber band arms holding the necks of her legs together.

the fluttered- a collectioni

Hear my joints dislocate, coming apart at the notion of sunlight. It falls and it settles in pictures of loveliness, golden tree branches and hints of leaves; of autumn, of spring.

I am so tall in the water. My legs are never-ending, crooked lines of peachskin- watching my fingers draw out ripples until they strain and buckle and fall into the cool. I’ll touch my toes and loop my figure and I’ll make giant ripples, abhorring fallen leaves and sending shivers of blue through his legs.

It’s a faded crimson red holding my breasts, tugging my hips and leaving my ribcage bare to the current. It’s smudged lipstick and smear

why didn't you say goodbye?Love wasn’t in the air the night you unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my skin. No, love definitely wasn’t in the air the night we spent in heat of moments, sweating and tumbling and fumbling on your father’s bed.

It was anywhere but there. Does love go on vacation? I ponder and make fleshy butterflies from my outstretched fingers. Probably.

I can’t remember much but I can remember the beginning. The burn of acid bleeding and gushing past my tongue and down my throat. The noises and then your silence. The clumsiness and then the awkward kisses.

You had a garden of dark hair growing from your scalp and dirt eyes. You had a

colour blind.She saw him at the park once. He was the colour of dirt; with bird eyes and white, mapped palms. Her little forehead lined as she felt the bile force its way up until her saliva was acid. She counted her toes and bit the inside of her cheek, should she run? Are they fast runners? She figured this one must be if he kept himself out of jail. The dark man flashed a mouthful of pebbles and held out his hand- which would have swallowed hers.

'Don't touch me.'

Her hands were all knuckles and her baby eyes tore into his. He faltered and stepped away, a half mouthed sorry. He looked upset, a grin spread like fire between her dimples.

Suddenly she

dear diary, today i diedshe's a ghost of a girl in the mirror. dark hair tangles like weeds below her shoulders and cuts at grey eyes. harsh shadows don't leave her with a skeleton like she sometimes hopes, but she feels it in her mind. feels the sharp edges and the trembled fragility, the silent cry for another's flesh and that outward plea of don't break me. cold fingers make love to cold glass while the sky cries over and over for sun.

this afternoon death made to kiss her lips but missed. he'd come so close she now knows what nothing doesn't feel like and she cannot fear it. it's a blankness so removed from consciousness she cannot reach it with thought- but sh

sleep-talk.

isn’t it curious how your fingers fit perfectly between each of my sclerous ribs, or how your breath mimics mine with belated accuracy

(count each breath and you’ll run out of fingers.)

don’t you remember the fairytales?

(and they both lived happily ever after, until after ran out and the monogamy became as non-existent as the magic.)

you were never one for myths. with discerning eyes, you’d plant kisses along the ridges of my back
across my shoulders
and the hollow beneath my jaw, questioning my pastel skin and every involuntary blink.

“I am not a myth.”

you can't feel through fabrictonight the rain becomes the earth
falling from hidden spaces in the sky and swollen clouds
i hear it make mud of dirt, and lovers of friends
and ask, quiet, where are you going but down?

i’m not all there in the head
you’re not all there in the head, my mother says
i’m not all there in the head i repeat
sometimes i’m there in my toes and fingers and heart as well

and now - in this downpour moment- i lie on the street
so warm that i think well that’s where love’s gotten to
but where is your shirt n? oh someplace else
and is that a light flickering in the house across the road? hide!

i rush in soaken w

fall asleep with me tonight.If I wrote you a lullaby with verses of moonlit, fogged breath and a chorus of heartbeats- would you fall asleep with our melody in your palms?

I lie awake at night and watch traffic lights outside my window shout RED into the peace quiet and occasional hazy rev of traffic. I lie awake and shiver through layers and wish to silent stars it wasn’t winter, wish the nighttime cool wouldn’t paint quite so many goose bumps on my skin and make my eyelids so cold. I lie awake at night and night-dream without sleep- about you and all your eyelashes and beautiful wordings.

I like the way your collarbone lies horizontally beneath your neck,

oh the little thingsIt’d be nice if he'd let me breathe. Just inhale a little air to keep my teeth company- maybe even exhale again when they grow tired of one another. You really don’t notice how wonderful it is to breathe until you’re lying stomach down with empty lungs and the creepy man from the corner store sitting on your back.

But what can I say? Not- ‘please get off of my back, I can feel my spine against my stomach and I don’t like it.’ Because I really can feel my spine against my stomach and am breathless to say such. My cheek makes like feet against the wooden floorboards. This man has a whole forest of trees in here! A

flesh puzzlesIn the beginning it was enough. I’d be wide-eyed, quietly watching her through the windows. Limbs and torso like a slender tree; bowing in wind and always shooting up toward the sun. She’d wear summer skin in the middle of winter with freckles spoiling her shoulders and cheekbones. Her birthmark was a dull red stain at her collarbone and she had a mole beneath her left breast. She was thirteen and I thirty, but my, oh my, did I ache to see her insides.

The house next door they called the sea house because it was two stories of cerulean blue. Through my bedroom window I could see naught but an empty bedroom. But late September the P

of storms and skysee my hair dance wild as wind-strings jerk it about//hear the ocean-wind heave itself against us all- crashing into our eyes and mouth//feel the winter-wind brush our skins in summer//then inhale the heaviness of air and sink through the dirt- because darling, you don’t deserve god’s beautiful violence.

(it drags the tree by its leaves saying kiss your trunk, kiss it and it does; releasing with a snap. the other trees flitter-flutter violently, crying within the cacophony of rain on concrete. white stars fall where light exists, and only sound where it disappears. the sky -the colour of sunburnt skin- watches it all with hunger. a

exhalation.Sixteen. Sixteen years since she was the size of a deflated lung beneath her mothers ribcage- now she has her own mass beneath her ribcage. Thumping sometimes to the outside, treating the skin of Laylla's stomach like a door. It will open in 3 months, it will be sliced open because her flesh is meat and they'll bring Sophie to air and she'll swallow until all she tastes is that dull white of the hospital. And then she'll cry and the music will drone in Laylla's ears until she tastes vomit and she is numb in all the aching places.

She doesn't know the father. She thinks Michael but she tells herself it is Louis. She repeats his name over and

sickDeath slouches over the edge of her bed, licking his lips as he caresses her thighs. He sings the noise of wind and rain crashing all around and her head throbs with the sound. Her head is hot. Her forehead is on fire and her cheeks catch alight with it. She burns silently and sees red, red, black.

Tiny insects have crawled beneath her fingernails and they dig with tiny claws and teeth until they are swarming beneath her skin, biting outward at her flesh. Each vertebrae carries bruises and as she tosses her body about the bed they ache loudly and sharply.

All the heat has rushed to her face, her body shakes like a leaf in wind and goosebump

this aprilThe moonlight falls through squinting blinds, bowing softly to hug the arc of his naked body. The blankets are strewn about his toes as a girl, no more than sixteen, lays wide-eyed and warm-bodied beside him.

She silently watches the dreams come and go beneath his eyelids, she quietly feels his chest rise, rise then fall and she listens to the heavy breathing that accompanies it. Beautiful breathing, she thinks, tracing generous lips with fingertips.

The air is cool but she is alight.

Everything in this room bathes in blue shade. She watches the alarm clock beside the bed, numbers coming and going out of fashion before her eyes.

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picture death.

by ~Pretty-As-A-Picture, Jul 18, 2008, 12:29:20 AM
Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir

I couldn’t bring myself to bury her.

I couldn’t bring myself to empty the ground of dirt and of earthworms and of the spindly weed roots, and fill in the ochre gap with her body. Her coffee-cream fur held her tiny skeleton from falling out when they hit her. I try not to think of miniature beat-less hearts and mute lungs. I never saw her dead, but I can imagine.

They found her on the median strip. Breathless and still by the endless whoosh of traffic.

In my mind I see Mum’s face; I see her heart throbbing at her feet and her cradling the dog, like a precious baby to her chest. I see the love flowing down her withered cheeks and her hands pressing into the fur, desperately releasing life from her fingertips. She wrapped her in a rainbow and buried her beneath a flowering mango tree.

When I came home she was standing on worn feet, looking forlorn and waiting for me. Around the door my little sisters freckles and cheeks are stained pink and shine in the light. “Are you going to help us bury her?” I look at the concrete, hallucinating and see a damp stain of a tiny body and whisper “No.”

I can’t handle the silence, I can’t handle the lack of warmth and I can’t handle the death.

Sometimes I talked to her, sometimes I told her I hurt and sometimes I asked if she hurt too. She’d angle her head and regard me with big puppy eyes and I’d laugh and blow in her ears until she kissed the skin of my cheeks and rubbed her face on my hair. She was always smiling. She’d always grin with blunt teeth and a long rose tongue, even when she was in trouble.

I never got many good photos of her, she’d wag her tail and rush to lick the lens or cover me in canine saliva. So I’d give up and just lay on the grass as she’d curl into a mass of heat at my head. She slept on my stomach and sometimes under my covers, but most of the time she slept with Mum.

Mum called me outside and we sat at the edge, where the concrete cut off and the earth started, staring at our backyard; our graveyard. She told me in a little voice that losing a pet can be like losing a family member, and her voice broke so subtly I hardly noticed. I fumbled with my rings and tried to find the disarrayed dirt, only half looking.

Mum says everything reminds her of her. I go through photographs, memories that still live, even when she doesn’t. I finally let myself cry. Select, Delete…

And let go.

picture death.by ~Pretty-As-A-Picture

Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir

true story.

r.i.p
18.7.08

everyone loved you
and your smiles
and warmth
and energy.

you were a part of our family we'll never forget.

love 5 5

~~joy 0 0~~

~~wow 0 0~~

~~mad 0 0~~

sad 13 13

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~katr14 Aug 29, 2012 Student General Artist

This image has been featured in

weekly newspaper --> [link]

~CaseyJewels Oct 7, 2011 Student Writer

This is very beautiful. And I'm so sorry for your loss. It hurts so much, to loss a four-legged friend.

~andtheydanced53 Feb 26, 2011

I cried.

~Berenegeladurush Oct 8, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

;__;

~skagandboneman Sep 8, 2010

i read this and i cried. cried so hard my eyes went numb.

~Chimeric-Dragoness Dec 30, 2009 Hobbyist Artist

Your piece is beautiful, it's comforting to me as a beloved pet of 15 years had to be put to sleep today.

R.I.P.
Scout - G. Shepard & Lab
D.O.D. - 12/30/2009

~ennabird May 27, 2009

wow...that completely made me cry. in fact, it took me several times to get through the entire thing i was crying so much. the piece is beautifully written.

~MixedZephyr Apr 30, 2009

*sniff*
That was amazing, almost strangely comforting...

~blossomsandmist Feb 24, 2009

this made me cry, it is so beautiful and well written.

!a-magical-poison Jan 13, 2009

_{i`m so sorry this happened.}

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